Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Glydo is an interesting addon for Firefox that automatically parses the page you are viewing, analyzes the contents and retrieves related news stories, Youtube videos, and tweets and displays it in the status bar.

Glydo is actually very useful. It shows you plenty of information – stories related to the current page, latest news stories, videos and recent tweets. Granted, they are not always related, but it’s so unobtrusive that you can just ignore it if the news do not interest you. If on the other hand, you find news and videos that looks interesting, you can click on the icons on the status bar and view the snippets in a small window. Clicking on a news headline will take you to the source page.

Glydo works well with certain kind of content. News content generally fairs well. If you are reading a news article in say BBC’s website, Glydo will show you the same story or sometimes related news stories from other news sites like Google news. Sometimes it also hits home with tech articles. For instance, I was reading an article on USB 3.0 and Glydo offered me stories about some USB 3.0 products recently unveiled. I also found a YouTube video on how to make a USB spy camera, and somebody on Twitter wrote I could save $7 on a USB mini mouse.

And if you are bored, you can read the top headlines from several sites like Yahoo news, MSN and even Perezhilton.com. News items are always recent and keeps updating every few minutes or when new items are available.

You can also share any page on Twitter, Facebook, Digg etc via AddThis.com

So yes, Glydo is an excellent tool for news addicts. The only thing I didn’t like is that it’s very limited. Glydo will show you only 3 or at most 4 items, with no option to view more. If they didn't clip everything to just 3, it would perhaps be more useful.